john over at genehack hits the nail on the head regarding a biting bit from michael moore:

“I have a certain tendency to think of Michael Moore as a funny, slap-dash kind of guy. I think it’s because time dulls the memory of how dark Roger & Me and Moore’s later TV shows were — they were funny, but whistling-in-the-dark funny. From reading his latest letter, however, it sounds like he’s stopped whistling, and started shouting.”

i grew up in the flint area and have friends and family on both sides of the auto labor force equation [line and management] – people thought many things when the movie came out, but that it was funny wasn’t one of them. it was dark and it affected people.

i still have family in the area and get back every once in awhile. when you ask how flint is doing – it always ends up sounding like you’re asking about the alcoholic uncle who has had a rough go of it, and tries and tries, but just can’t quite seem to kick his habit. according to michael, it doesn’t seem like flint can get gm out of its system and nafta is exacerbating the issue:

“In my hometown of Flint, 32,000 GM jobs have been lost since you and Clinton took office. That’s 5,000 MORE GM jobs than were lost there during the ENTIRE 12 years of Reagan/Bush! Are you even aware
that two-thirds of the school children in Flint live below the federal poverty level? And you wonder why the race in Michigan is so close! These people you left behind had nowhere else to go EXCEPT to Nader — unless they choose to just stay home on Election Day, which is what the majority of them will do.”

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Conflux :: A Confluence of Curiousness

i’m not sure how to square these findings with the fact that i’ve long said that in a parallel universe very close to our own i live alone in cabin in the middle of nowhere writing manifestos: “The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,” they found. And “more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently.”

the heart warming fable of thanksgiving, unsurprisingly, ends up being a whole lot more complicated than some of us were taught and answers the nagging question of how squanto spoke perfect english when the pilgrims arrived and what was happening during the 100 year interim between columbus and the pilgrims ( spoiler: it involves human trafficking, enslavement and villages being wiped out ). and if you’re a stickler for tradition, you should put ditch the turkey and cranberry sauce for salted pork and olives since the spanyiards were the first to celebrate thanksgiving 50 years before the pilgrims.

“…researchers from a Bosch startup called Deepfield Robotics presented a paper on “Vision-Based High-Speed Manipulation for Robotic Ultra-Precise Weed Control,” which has like four distinct exciting-sounding phrases in it.”IEEE Spectrum

after updating to iOS 9 and el capitan i’ve been having troubles synching photos from my iphone to my macbook air. the mac would recognize the iphone but no photos would show up in the photos application or image capture. it was driving me nuts. turns out, if you have non-apple services like dropbox running that sync your photos to non-icloud services you have to turn them off.

having run a half a dozen marathons, i can’t imagine finishing in 3:05. even more unimaginable in full amish garb so kudos to leroy stolzfus. the whole article is great read but now i want to know more of the backstory on why he started to run: “A few years ago, Stolzfus got “involved with some stuff” he said he shouldn’t have. His brother-in-law suggested he start running instead when he was tempted. He took the suggestion to heart, and went out for a run.”

huh, who knew edward tufte has a farm with 234-acres of landscape sculpture fields that he opens to the public once a year. i’d love to make a trip. and i also love the article’s description of tufte, “[he] is also known as a genius of data visualization, professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale, an author of books on information design, and a hater of PowerPoint.

“The Chagossian people have a word, in their Creole language, for heartbreak: sagren. It is a profound sorrow which refers to the loss of a home, and the impossibility of returning to it. As we build new worlds with our technologies, knitted from fiber-optic light and lines of code, it is incumbent on us to ensure it does not reproduce the erasures and abuses of the old, but properly accounts for the rights and liberties of every one of us.”citizen-ex